Apologies to Qimmik but I say that when an Italian pronounces a double l, you hear separate l's in the different syllables in cal-li-dus and not just a long l, and that's a good way of pronouncing latin. But there's no law to stop you using a long l. Calidus would be pronounced ca-li-dus, a different sound.

adrianus wrote:Apologies to Qimmik but I say that when an Italian pronounces a double l, you hear separate l's in the different syllables in cal-li-dus and not just a long l, and that's a good way of pronouncing latin. But there's no law to stop you using a long l. Calidus would be pronounced ca-li-dus, a different sound.

Phonetically speaking there is no reason why to make a release in the middle, when you have two liquids... since they are liquids - or lateral approximants, if you will. (ergo reason for long "l")

I also somehow didn't hear you very clearly doing that in your recording.

Could you post a recording of a native Italian who says double "l" in a casual speech with a release after the first L and then another after the second one? I'm very curious to hear that. (or are you a native Italian perhaps?)

(Personally I think it is even bigger insanity than when I hear Evan Der Millner making I-don't-know-why a release when saying two stops (tt, pp, dd,bb,kk,gg) after the first one and then another release in the end [so making 2 releases!!] instead of making just one release in the end but prolonging the time between (as Italians do). (And I tried to tell him... but he's ignoring any such remarks) -> But I'm ready to be proven wrong

A double l sound has a continuous sound but it has a different l sound at the start indicating a syllable end and another l sound at the end indicating a syllable start. To describe the -ll- sound as a long l is not accurate. Revisit http://www.adrianmallon.com/latin/callidus.htm for an additional thing on "palla" spoken by the Italian speaker in the earlier reference.

adrianus wrote:A double l sound has a continuous sound but it has a different l sound at the start indicating a syllable end and another l sound at the end indicating a syllable start. To describe the -ll- sound as a long l is not accurate. Revisit http://www.adrianmallon.com/latin/callidus.htm for an additional thing on "palla" spoken by the Italian speaker in the earlier reference.

I wrote a long answer, but my browser crashed... and I don't have the strength anymore to write it again.

So in short:

Your link: Is it you? Are you/the speaker and/or a native Italian? Give me exactly the time of the recording where I can hear the one word with the double-l where the difference is heard. (because there is a lot of "audio spam" in the recording, some unnecessary spelling aloud, etc.)

But I am afraid that we need a more raw linguistic material: A recording of a native Italian who has not made the recording for the sole purpose of this thread and who didn't know what the listener would care for in the time he was recorded (= no bias from his side or unnatural sounds).

Second thing: Could you describe the difference you are talking about in more phonetic/acoustic terms? Are you talking about a release in the middle (if I can call it a release, even though it is not an affricate or a stop), or what is it that you are talking about?

Another thing: Why do you think so, what are your sources? I take Italian as an argument, but: Are you a native Italian? But even if you are, I need what I described above: some neutral recording that has nothing to do with this thread and which clearly makes the thing you are talking about obvious.

Once we have such audio sample, we can put it into an audio editor (which cannot be deceived and is an objective tool for a phonetician to assess sounds of speech, all imaginations and opinions are irrelevant there) and say whether there really is something that you describe (and I don't know yet what you describe because I need you to explain it in more phonetic/acoustic terms than you have done so far) or whether it is only your impression.

I am Irish.The Italian speaker who pronounces "palla" was from the reference by A.A.I. above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-r_l5vgBoYThe illustration of the word "palla" by the unsuspecting Italian speaker originated in an audio editor.

adrianus wrote:I am Irish.The Italian speaker who pronounces "palla" was from the reference by A.A.I. above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-r_l5vgBoYThe illustration of the word "palla" by the unsuspecting Italian speaker originated in an audio editor.

Alright. I will dissect the double "ll" of the girl in the Youtube video. That seems a legit sample. But now: What I should be looking for in phonetic/acoustic terms exactly? Auditively I'm ready to say that it is nothing but a long "L", but let us look at it in detail.

In the Italian, there doesn't seem to be the same distinctions as in Latin. I'm hearing long V + single C and short V preceding the doubles - except some seems to stand out more (ss, nn, perhaps others).

A.A.I wrote:In the Italian, there doesn't seem to be the same distinctions as in Latin. I'm hearing long V + single C and short V preceding the doubles - except some seems to stand out more (ss, nn, perhaps others).

Well, bear in mind, that in Italian the stress makes the vowel longer unless, as you demonstrated, the vowel is followed by two consonants In Latin the stress never ever affects the vowel length. So "parō" e.g. must have a short "a" even when the stress is initial (you can guess that the stress is not particularly auditively strong there then). Italian has for each vowel a longer allophone which occurs in stressed syllables. Latin has the long vowels as phonemes (= allophone is a variant of a sound you make without noticing that you change the sound = that you pronounce a variant; a phoneme is a sound that you distinctively recognize as a different sound)

Last edited by Godmy on Mon Mar 17, 2014 2:47 am, edited 2 times in total.

Conclusion: There is an "l", which is made so long, that you can notice a slight vowel/no-vowel change (which is a normal thing!), but inside it doesn't show any noticible change. The volume is fairly constant (cca 0.03-0.05dB).From this I can conclude that any hypothesis that you have about it having two parts is probably just your subjective impression, but not an objective description of the reality. (At least for the tested word)

I can give you also other words, but it takes time though.

Last edited by Godmy on Mon Mar 17, 2014 2:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

I already did this with "palla", Godmy. I looked at it more, however, did this experiment, and, as a result, I see that I was wrong, and the -al transitional sound is just the same as the -a l- transitional sound in "pala" so the "-al" sound in palla doesn't bear a signal for an end of a syllable and only the protracted pure l sound is significant.

I appreciate that you looked at it in detail, that you did the experiment yourself (palla was my next picture I would send, the continuous "l" sound is maybe even more obvious there), made those 'graphs' and that you confessed a kind of error (that is every time difficult).

(I really like the way you made the page and the diagrams! But I would recommend you to make the downloading of your MP3s more available at the site or available to download at all, because the player is not working correctly in all browsers with all kinds of setups)

Yes, we can look at the onsets and ends of the consonants as separate phones (diphones/allophones - hard to say)... and of course: what we call a pure "L" sound could be also described in vocalic terms as I proposed in my picture (that the "L" sound is partially a consonantal sound and partially there is pronounced in the background a hidden and easily described schwa-like vowel unless in transitional stages or unless for a really short non-syllabic "l").

But I think that to hear the "L"s really as two would be visible in terms of volume. There would have to be a sudden descension (a decrease), then almost a silence and 'ascension' (an increase) again - even if veeery short. Otherwise I cannot imagine it much...------------------------------------------

By the way... I really hope that metrodorus joins some day some of these phonetic discussions (if not this one, because I mentioned him), as he seems to me as a guy who is very orthodox about some aspects of Latin pronunciation and yet he continues performing double stops with a release in the middle -> with two releases in total I'm almost begging to be argued against... but he won't show.

(And I think he's an important person in the Latin online as he has how many? over 1000 Youtube Latin videos)

Godmy wrote:But I think that to hear the "L"s really as two would be visible in terms of volume. There would have to be a sudden descension (a decrease), then almost a silence and 'ascension' (an increase) again - even if veeery short. Otherwise I cannot imagine it much...

That what I imagined the AL transitional sounds and the LA transitional sounds to convey in corresponding to syllable ends and starts in pal-la. But they don't do it in a way that differs from the AL transitional sound in pa-la. I thought I could hear it but not after that little editing experiment.

If I'm not mistaken (and I really know very little about acoustical phonetics) the spectrogram represents frequency plotted against time. The fact that there are two frequency peaks in the spectrogram doesn't necessarily mean that the tongue touches the alveolar ridge twice in articulating the double consonant ll, does it?

Godmy wrote:But I think that to hear the "L"s really as two would be visible in terms of volume. There would have to be a sudden descension (a decrease), then almost a silence and 'ascension' (an increase) again - even if veeery short. Otherwise I cannot imagine it much...

That what I imagined the AL transitional sounds and the LA transitional sounds to convey in corresponding to syllable ends and starts in pal-la. But they don't do it in a way that differs from the AL transitional sound in pa-la. I thought I could hear it but not after that little editing experiment.

I think all you could ultimately hear would be a change of the background vowel behind the "L" foreground... but it would be very hard to postulate from that an existence of really two distinct sounds in human mind (which somehow coalesce).

Qimmik wrote:If I'm not mistaken (and I really know very little about acoustical phonetics) the spectrogram represents frequency plotted against time. The fact that there are two frequency peaks in the spectrogram doesn't necessarily mean that the tongue touches the alveolar ridge twice in articulating the double consonant ll, does it?

I'm not an expert myself but I usually **know** enough to get around...

(By the way when we say a spectogram, we're usually not talking about those diagrams we have both posted with Adrian. Those we call a waveform. A spectogram is something like this (http://i.stack.imgur.com/sk0QQ.png the upper one is a spectogram, the lower one is a waveform) and it is great tool for determining the actual vowel qualities (in the spectogram it is time(horizontal line), vs. the actual sound frequency in Hz (*vertical line), vs. the amplitude/the volume (the color/the thickness of particular parts)).-> and it wouldn't be a bad idea to use a spectogram too to prove some points...)

Anyway, the waveforms:Yes, the horizontal line is time, the vertical line is a volume amplitude. It depends which peaks we mean. If there wouldn't be at least a little short visible almost total silence (and maybe there wouldn't with a voiced consonant which "L", or the one we are talking about, usually is, since the voice wouldn't stop) there would be 2 visible vowel peaks in the "L", which occur immediately after the tongue touches the alveolar ridge (you could also say that touching the ridge interrupts the current background "L" vowel which was in progress and thus creating the peaks). So one gradual peak, a drop, and another gradual peak.

Something like this (the word 'palla' pronounced -incorrectly- with double articulated "ll"):(the other one is smaller due to me dropping my voice)

But we cannot observe this in the native recordings... we can observe slight changes in the intonation either due to overall word intonation pattern from the beginning to the end or because the "L" slowly glides from it's schwa-like background vowel sound to the forthcoming 'full vowel' sound (in the case of the preceding picture I sent, it was "o").------------------------------------------------------

(Off topic) By the way Qimmik, I'll probably in some strange and pervert way will regret this and I don't do this often... or rather never (on the other hand I do not frequent this forum so often, so maybe it is ok that I say that as a kind of outsider... since I can just 'disappear'), but since there is no evaluation system at this forum (and there are such systems at other fora, where you can express passively that you "like" someone's post), I must do this orally. I've been wanting to say this for some time: I really appreciate all your posts at this forum, they are usually incredibly informative, not seldomly even way more informative than others' posts (and I feel you should be told) and this forum.... the Latin internet is incredibly lucky that there are such active users as you are, who do not feel that they would be only wasting their time sharing their knowledge with others who didn't get nearly as far, in their free time and for free. (You are the same increment to this forum as those users under the nicknames Aurifex or Imber Ranae at the other Latin internet forum (also an English Latin forum - you may know it. I don't know if I can name here other fora))...

and maybe I simply felt that it was unfair that one cannot evaluate one's post at this forum, so that's why I do this. And maybe I just hiddenly fear that such people like you could get one day dissuaded to frequent these places and just disappear... So I hope you do not mind me having said that

Last edited by Godmy on Sun Apr 13, 2014 6:17 am, edited 5 times in total.

Thanks for your kind words, Godmy. I generally try to avoid spreading misinformation on the internet, and I try to cite sources (Allen & Greenough and Lewis & Short for Latin) which can be linked to whenever I can. And I try not to comment when I feel someone else has said what needs to be said. Participating in the forum has helped me sharpen my own knowledge of Latin and Greek.

You certainly do! I don't often meet people who can teach me some 'very new' stuff about Latin (not because I'm that good <- far from it, but because ... I simply do not meet them often) but you are certainly one of them

(It is of course hard for me to imagine that, as you said, you sharpened your knowledge here... How much sharper can so sharp knowledge still become I ask myself But take it as a kind of compliment, nothing serious.)

Sharpening my knowledge: by looking up questions in the reference books and not relying on my memory, I often find that my memory was faulty--or else I learn something extraneous to the question itself that I didn't know (or had forgotten).

Qimmik wrote:Sharpening my knowledge: by looking up questions in the reference books and not relying on my memory, I often find that my memory was faulty--or else I learn something extraneous to the question itself that I didn't know (or had forgotten).

And that is why I would recommend even to experienced Latin teachers to visit these places, to put their knowledge to the test every day, to confirm their knowledge or to have it/the misconceptions refuted. To approach the community...The one example I like is the old retired former teacher of Latin at Oxford (Peter Needham) who has translated Harry Potter to Latin. The translation is outstanding, but he does make **sometimes** mistakes in the use of perfect/imperfect and exactly in those places where English tempts its native speakers to make those mistakes (where, e.g. English uses past simple, but it is in fact a habitual past and the imperfect is to be used in Latin or Romance languages, not the perfect <- and not surprisingly all the Romance translations of Harry Potter have it correct in those very places using the imperfect, where he used the perfect).So had he visited these places, he would have certainly found sooner or later that his knowledge of the difference between these two tenses simply differs -> is not complete despite his incredible talent to write in a quite idiomatic Latin (and probably no lesser talent to read it). And we wouldn't have had it in the book the way we have it now

Last edited by Godmy on Tue Mar 18, 2014 3:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.

A.A.I wrote:I'm just not understanding "double consonants", it seems. Thought I had it down pretty well but now I just can't seem to separate the vowel length.

short V + long C / long V + long C, just end up sounding identical.

I don't have a list of minimal pairs but I'd love to see such a list recorded. (Trying to collect words from some books now...)

To have a long vowel followed by a doubleconsonant is not that often thing (+ since we rarely know the vowel quantity of the vowel in a closed syllable, though sometimes we do). Otherwise the difference (short vowel, long consonant VS long vowel, short consonant) is well distinguishable.

Some such words with a long vowel and a 'long' consonant (those words where we are quite certain with the length in the closed syllable = the hidden quantity) are: nūllus; ūllus; nārrō,āre

I don't know about any minimal pair here...

Last edited by Godmy on Tue Mar 18, 2014 3:58 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I'm just not understanding "double consonants", it seems. Thought I had it down pretty well but now I just can't seem to separate the vowel length.

I wouldn't worry too much about this. As Godmy notes, in many if not most cases we can't tell whether a vowel followed by two consonants (or a double consonant) would have been long or short. A principal source for information about the quantity of vowels is Latin verse. Latin verse can reveal whether a syllable was long or short because the metrical patterns are based on alterations of long and short syllables. In other words, if we understand the metrical pattern, we can generally tell whether each syllable would have been long or short.

In general, a syllable is short if it contains a short vowel followed by a single consonant, and long if either (a) it contains a long vowel or (b) it ends with two consonants (or (c) both). (This is a somewhat crude way of stating the rule, and there are exceptions, but it's adequate for the present purposes.) So if a syllable ends with two consonants, it's treated as long and it will show up in metrical slots reserved for long syllables. But in many, if not most, cases, we can't tell whether the vowel in such a syllable is long or short from its metrical shape (although there may be reasons other than meter, such as etymology, for inferring that it is long or short). As a result, there are many words where we have no way of telling whether a given vowel--one followed by two consonants or a double consonant--should be considered long or short.

But the main reason to keep long and short vowels straight is to be able to discern the metrical patterns of Latin verse, which enables us to appreciate Latin verse as fully as possible. If a syllable ends with two consonants (or a double consonant), we can be assured that it's long, and we really don't need to know whether the vowel is long or short.

Not confusing but I'm not sure if it helps any, since there isn't much to be "done" about it! haha

Although I don't know anything about the metres of poetry, I can grasp the idea that they must fit into certain patterns (or be made to fit?). Is it that these words simply don't appear in the poetry? Or is there something else at play?

I'm more concerned with this that you think I should be but the reason is that I'm not interested in Latin as a dead language. I need to be able to say words; to breath life into them. Hope that makes sense.

Just found the word 'culullus' and find that I just can't do it. The 'll' ends up just pushing the next u to be long. I'm doing something very wrong.

No, the point is that the meter doesn't give a clue as to the quantity of the vowel. The syllable is long because it ends with two consonants, so the vowel could be either long or short. But after all, the most compelling reason to pay attention to vowel quantity is to be able to understand the meters, anyway, so you're not losing much if you don't know the quantity of a vowel in a syllable that is long because it ends with two consonants. (Actually, that is a misstatement--the second consonant "belongs" to the following syllable; double consonants "belong" to both syllables. You could reformulate the rule to say that closed syllables--those ending in a consonant--are long--and of course there are some exceptions to these rules.)

There are some words that don't appear in poetry, for one reason or another. Unless there's some other source of information, the quantity of the vowels in these words can't be determined.

But I would suggest not spending too much time on Latin pronunciation, which to some extent is irrecoverable, and instead getting on with mastering the grammar.

Thanks for your very detailed information. It's all very helpful, Qimmik.

I'm just trying to tease out all of the pronunciation information that I can. I'm a singer/musician and I get a lot of pleasure from the sounds of languages. What I'm trying to create is a consistent system for myself so that I can even just read words aloud. I've pretty much got that sorted as this was one of my last issues.

Godmy, I've seen your thread and I have all of the books in the series (that I'm aware of). My learning of Latin only started recently but the desire to do so, and collection of resources in perparation for it, have not.

Your pronunciation seems very polished to me, however, as you're likely aware of yourself, it still has that pedagogical feel. That's probably what you're going for but I've progressed to a stage where the overal phonology and not the individual phonetics are the issue (apart from some work needed on long consonants ).

Elison, stress patterns, prosody, etc: It's difficult stuff because we have fewer ways for reconstructing that side of things. Just working out the individual phonemes must have been a huge task, even with the information we have. Still, it has to come together in some form, in my own head. It's also about not simply allowing English phonetics and orthographic conventions (and my own diaglossic relationship with them) to heavily influence my own Latin.

I also don't bother with the 'qu' as a labiovelar stop. Although Vox Latina describes it, it doesn't seem to recommend it. Also, I don't bother with the different types of L. On the other hand, I do include the final nasal and like to assimilate and elide where I have seen evidence that it occured. I'm still learning more about these processes.